Take your taste buds to Italy.

I love these little Italian pasties and this weekend I decided to pick up a few for a tasty treat. My husband loves dessert, so I picked up a half-dozen of each, Zeppole and Cannoli, as I knew they wouldn’t last until my brother and sister-in-law visited.

You have probably encountered these in your local grocery store chain or in Italian bakeries as they’ve become pretty mainstream. If you haven’t, the Cannoli is a fried pastry tube generally filled with a ricotta cheese mixture and dusted with icing sugar, though there are other flavoured fillings as well. The Zeppole is a round, doughnut shaped baked pastry that is cut in half and filled with a creamy custard filling with a dusting of icing sugar and a few black cherries on top.

I prefer these pasties to many of the North American desserts as these are not overly sweet, and being European myself, my taste buds, I think, gravitate to the less sweet. Zeppole are more traditional around Easter, which is coming up soon, so go seek out the more authentic kind and give them a try. Don’t forget a nice Cappuccino to go with them. Enjoy.